As
per the current practice in IITJEE Advanced, candidates are given options of
taking the examination in the computer mode, possible only at a handful of centres,
or through pen-and-paper mode which is preferred by most of the students. If
the exam becomes completely computer based, every center will be provided the
questions through a CD or encrypted file. Then the students will have to open
the question paper on a computer and answer a question with a click of the
mouse almost similar to the pattern of the Common Admission Test (CAT)
conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management.

Advantages
of Computer-based IITJEE Advanced

An entirely computer-based test would lead to faster
evaluation.

Save time of manual distribution and collection of
answer papers and also scanning them.

Further, to avoid repeats and string of flawed or ambiguous questions set, one of the
possible solutions suggested has been a pre-prepared Question bank, screened
thoroughly for ambiguity and other defects.

PROPOSALS ABOUT IITJEE ADVANCED

·Fully
computer-based test

·More
than one test a year

·A
question bank of 25000 questions

·A
mix of questions of varying difficulties, assessed on a scale of 1 to 10

·Results
in percentile instead of percentage, scores

America's
Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), conducted for undergraduate admissions, set 90
per cent of the questions from a bank while the rest are experimental questions
that carry no marks. If the students, unaware which questions are experimental
and forced to attempt all, do not find the experimental questions ambiguous,
opaque or too difficult, these are added to the question bank.

If
the proposal for a question bank is cleared, each of the bank's suggested 25000
questions may be graded on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10 to ensure a judicious
mix of harder and easier questions.

The
ministry of HRD wants the questions to be such that Class 11 and 12 students
can comfortably answer them. Currently, all the questions in a particular
section of the paper carry identical marks. But under the proposed system, a
question's difficulty level will dictate how many marks it carries. The
ministry also wants the results to be declared in terms of candidate's
percentile score as done in CAT, GATE etc.

What
is percentile and how percentile score is calculated?

A candidate's
percentile is the number of students ranked below him divided by the number
that took the exam, and the dividend multiplied by 100.

However, it is not clear why the ministry believes this would be a better system. IIT
Kanpur will conduct the JEE Advanced 2018.